Health Care is a Human Right!

Source: NESRI

Are you among those political junkies anticipating tomorrow's Supreme Court decision on the healthcare reform bill? Maybe while we're waiting we could take a moment to get a little human rights perspective on what kind of healthcare system we need:

Everyone has the right to health, including health care, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Health care is a public good, not a commodity. The U.S. health care system must fulfill these principles:

Universality: Everyone in the United States has the human right to health care.

Equity: Benefits and contributions should be shared fairly to create a system that works for everyone.

Accountability: The U.S. government has a responsibility to ensure that care comes first.

Visit the AIUSA website and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative site for more on health as a human right. 

And then to pass the time, sample some of the thoughtful columns Frank Huyler, the emergency room doctor who wrote one of our selections, Right of Thirst, has written  the New York Daily News:

Health care reform was the right thing to do...

Our rotten dental care system...

One young man's war...

And he puts that storytelling experience to good use in One patient's story...

"Ma'am," I said curtly, after introducing myself, "Why did you come to the ER in the middle of the night to get your prescriptions refilled?"

"I didn't come in the middle of the night," she replied. "I came yesterday afternoon."

She spoke sharply enough to get my attention. I glanced at her chart once more. Sure enough, she'd been waiting for 11 hours.

Ask yourself as you read is this a story that shows our health care system to be universal, equitable and accountable? What's your story?

Still Healing in Liberia

I'm sure many of our Loyal Readers thought of Helene Cooper, New York Times reporter and author of a memoir, The House at Sugar Beach, about growing up in Liberia when they heard the news about conviction of Charles Taylor, ex-President of Liberia for war crimes. In today's paper she relates the stories of how Taylor's trail of brutality tore apart the lives of her sisters Eunice and Janice and the reactions of her relatives upon hearing of Taylor's fate. The conviction was for Taylor's actions in Sierra Leone and Cooper remarks,

It was in Liberia that Mr. Taylor campaigned for president using the slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him anyway,” in a telling acknowledgment of the psychological damage a pointless war can inflict on a country. It is in Liberia that, almost a decade after Mr. Taylor was driven from the country, men and women today are trying to turn former child soldiers into functional people.

There are dizzyingly complex reasons Mr. Taylor was tried for what he did in Sierra Leone, instead of Liberia, many of them involving the effort to keep the hard-won peace that now exists between factions in Liberia. I know this. I just hope that when history books recount this first head of state to be convicted by an international court since Nuremberg, they remember Liberia.

Amnesty International has issued a press release calling for additional prosecutions, reparations and more attention to war crimes in Liberia.

By the way, Janice Cooper, a physician was featured by PBS Newshour in a report last year. She returned to Liberia as project lead for a mental health initiative supported by the Atlanta-based Carter Center and Liberia Ministry’s of Health and Social Welfare,

Cooper recently paid one of her weekly visits to Monrovia Central Prison, where the mental health program has launched a groundbreaking initiative to support prisoners. The prison was so overcrowded and dirty it was singled out by Amnesty International [see report] for human rights violations. Cooper and her staff have converted a cinder block building there into a small, modest mental health facility where prisoners can now attend psychotherapy sessions and meet with family members.

Read the article to learn more about why mental health is such an urgent need in this struggling nation. Let's hope bringing Charles Taylor to justice will help heal a few more scars.

A bookish look at the World Bank President nominees

Who would have thought that there would be so many Rights Readers angles to the appointment of a World Bank President? At first I thought the hook was a movement to draft Nobel Prize Winner and guru of microfinance, Muhammad Yunus, (Banker To The Poor). But, he politely demurred. But then I read that the Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is seeking the position. Her son, Uzodinma Iweala, is the author of a novel we read, Beasts of No Nation. The Economist has strongly endorsed her candidacy,

Ms Okonjo-Iweala is an orthodox economist, which many will hold against her. But if there is one thing the world has discovered about poverty reduction in the past 15 years, it is that development is not something rich countries do to poor ones. It is something poor countries manage for themselves, mainly by the sort of policies that Ms Okonjo-Iweala has pursued with some success in Nigeria.

And then there is President Barack Obama's nominee, Jim Yong Kim. Mr. Kim, currently the President of Dartmouth College, is a co-founder of Partners in Health along with Paul Farmer. We learned about their innovations in global public health when we read Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains. If you have the time, this lecture on global health from a couple years ago is a nice introduction to Jim Kim, or check out this Bill Moyers interview to find out, among other things, what insights his unusual background in medicine and anthropology might bring to the culture of the World Bank,

BILL MOYERS: You are trained as an anthropologist too, as well as in medicine. What do you think the eye of an anthropologist sees, that a physician on his or her own might not see?

DR. JIM YONG KIM: Well, I think that in medicine, what we're trained to do is to look for patterns, to build order out of great complexity, out of very subtle signs and symptoms, and then have a plan where you can act. Anthropologists are a little bit different, we don't often act on what we do. So I'm sort of in the middle now. I do the ethnography, to try to get a sense of what the culture is. 

You know, if you want to know what anthropologists do, one of my great professors, Sally Falk Moore once said, it's very simple. You walk into a room and you say, "Who are these people and what do they want?" So if you're constantly asking that question, over time, you build up a sense of how a particular social system works. That's always what we've done. Paul Farmer's also an anthropologist, we've done this together for many, many years.

What is it that we need to do to actually change policy around HIV treatment or drug resistant TB treatment? And that anthropological piece of it, linked to a physician's approach to solving a problem and putting a solution on the table, taking people through difficult times-- That's been a very good combination for me.

Both Mr. Kim and Ms. Okonjo-Iweala would be ground-breaking appointments. It should be exciting to see where the World Bank goes from here.

World AIDS Day Reflections

I just finished reading Patti Smith's Just Kids, the poet-musician's celebration of her life with the artist Robert Maplethorpe. This brought to mind a visit I made, at the height of the controversy over his homoerotic photographs, to a small gallery in Berkeley, to take in the sensual bends and folds of his flowers and nudes. With the account of his death from AIDS and World AIDS Day (today) in mind, I also found myself remembering the very moving annual candelight AIDS Posada, where we chalked the names of our friends as well as those of famous people like Maplethorpe on the pavement in front of Pasadena City Hall.  And then there was the time that the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt blanketed the Rose Bowl. As thankful as I am that the urgency of that time has waned as treatments have progressed, what happened to the movement in Pasadena? As it happens, Pasadena Weekly has a timely article describing Pasadena's early leadership role in organizing AIDS awareness and the relative apathy of today,

Local activists are battling not just a diminishing public interest in the cause, but also a continued decrease in funding and donations at the local, state and federal levels.

Visit the AIDS Service Center's website to find out how you can support AIDS programs in the Pasadena area.

Today, the center, located at 909 S. Fair Oaks Ave. in Pasadena, supports more than 1,000 clients living with the disease and offers services to another 4,000 residents in the form of HIV/AIDS 101 education programs and testing, according to Director of Marketing and Development Anthony Guthmiller.

We've also become fans of Paul Farmer's work on AIDS, as detailed by Tracy Kidder in Mountains Beyond Mountains. This would be a good time to check into the Partners in Health website and see how their innovative approach is affecting HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide.

Our July Author: Tracy Kidder (Strength in What Remains)

Strength in What Remains (Random House Reader's Circle)Our July author, Tracy Kidder (Strength in What Remains), has his own website: Tracy Kidder.com, a good place to start.  But readers of this book will probably find it more rewarding to spend some time at Village Health Works which features many videos about the clinic and the people it serves as well as descriptions of the ambitious programs the VHW is undertaking. You can also find VHW on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

There are several good interviews with Tracy Kidder available. You can download the Los Angeles Public Library and CSPAN interviews from iTunes. On Point brings in VHW's executive director Sarah Broom for the second half of the program and Radio Open Source goes deep on genocide and public health here.

Here is a short video excerpt of an interview from PRI's The World:


An Interview with Author Tracy Kidder from Clark Boyd on Vimeo.

Finally, be sure to check out this NYT editorial by Tracy Kidder: A Death in Burundi.

Our June Author: Frank Huyler

This month we read the novel Right of Thirst by writer-physican Frank Huyler.  This brief audio interview from KUNM radio gives a good explanation of the themes and events that inspired the novel.

In this UCPress interview, Huyler is asked for his views on healthcare reform and puts in a plug for a Rights Readers favorite, W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz.

From New Mexico Magazine:

Q: What unique insights, as a physician, do you bring to your fiction?
A: I don’t know that I bring special insight, but being a doctor often reminds you of the real forces in the world. As a doctor, you’re around dramatic events. You’re seeing people in extreme circumstances. There’s an enormous advantage to seeing that all the time. Being exposed to elemental forces is an advantage. It’s the antithesis of the ivory tower—the dark tower, perhaps. It’s very much the real world

And here's a short video introduction to the book from the author:



Finally, The Guardian has a profile focused on his earlier memoir, The Blood of Strangers, an excerpt of which can be found at LOST Magazine.

Here's a little bonus on the subject of relief workers: a trailer for the film Living in Emergency about Doctor's without Borders.  Now playing Pasadena!

ProSorata

Frank Huyler, author of this month's selection, Right of Thirst, is donating some of the proceeds from his book to an NGO that provides health care to women and children in Bolivia.  I'll give him a chance to tell you about it:





Learn more about ProSorata at their website.  And while you are at it you can check out Amnesty International's campaign for maternal health here.  Don't forget to take action!

Rights Readers Authors on Haiti

As is often the case, Rights Readers authors have special insights into events that concern us most and the Haitian earthquake is no exception. (Amnesty International's concerns for Haiti going forward are outlined here.)

Tracy Kidder comes forward in the New York Times (Country Without a Net) with an analysis of Haiti's development problems and a plug for the subject of his book Mountains Beyond Mountains,

But there are effective aid organizations working in Haiti. At least one has not been crippled by the earthquake. Partners in Health, or in Haitian Creole Zanmi Lasante, has been the largest health care provider in rural Haiti. (I serve on this organization’s development committee.) It operates, in partnership with the Haitian Ministry of Health, some 10 hospitals and clinics, all far from the capital and all still intact. As a result of this calamity, Partners in Health probably just became the largest health care provider still standing in all Haiti.

Certainly, Partners in Health would be a very worthy place for your charity dollar.



Amy Wilentz (The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier) is a local favorite with appearances on an informative KCRW program, and in op-eds for HuffPo, and the LATimes, where she tries to stay optimistic about Haitian resilience,

The tragedy is tremendous and the threats to life ongoing in a situation in which the ground is still trembling and disease likely. But the capacity of this people for survival and, indeed, for greatness in the worst of conditions has been demonstrated for more than two centuries. These are the descendants of people who overthrew an indecent, inhuman, overpowering slave system. Many of those still alive grew up under a vicious dynasty and rose up to oust it.

And finally, of course, Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I'm Dying) has been sharing her concerns for family and the country of her birth at Democracy Now, NPR, CNN and no doubt other outlets. More moving though, may be this video recitation (starting at about the 11 minute mark), made after a different disaster, of the high points of the intertwined history of Haiti and the United States. May we draw on and strengthen those bonds now.

Human Rights and Global Warming

We here at Rights Readers are always interested in bringing creativity and humor to activism, so today we bring you wooden snowmen protesting global warming in Norway (more background at Boing Boing).

On a more serious note, here are a couple of articles on the intersection of human rights and global warming. First from an article in Amnesty Magazine by Ross Gelbspan,

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the rights to secure shelter, food, health, and the tools for basic sustenance — all of which are endangered by the extreme weather, disease outbreaks, crop failures, and famine caused by global warming. The impact of an increasingly unstable climate falls disproportionately on people in poor countries. They are hit hardest — not because nature discriminates against the poor, but because developing countries cannot afford the kinds of infrastructures, such as back-up food reserves, redundant generating systems, and accessible healthcare facilities, needed to buffer the effects of global warming.

And from openDemocracy:

...there must be a conscious reframing of the climate-change debate in terms of human rights. One group of the world's peoples (namely the poor and vulnerable) have found that their right to live and prosper has been harmed by the actions of another group of people (namely the rich).

Something to keep in mind as we plan our usual run of "Earth Day" events this spring. Hmmm... this has really turned into Science Week here at Rights Readers!

Update: Always alert for a book-related link, we note that Mark Hertsgaard, author of Rights Readers selection, Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future has weighs in at The Nation. Plus another article at openDemocracy observes tensions between the developed and developing world already heating up over global warming at the African Union meeting.

Libyan HIV case

Some of our Loyal Readers may be interested in following the case of the six health professionals who have been sentenced to death for after being convicted of deliberately infecting 426 children with HIV in Libya. Amnesty is calling for their release. An excerpt from one of Amnesty's press statement on the case:

"This is the second time that these six medical professionals have been sentenced to death by Libyan courts. In this trial, as in their earlier one, confessions which they have repeatedly alleged were extracted from them under torture were used as evidence against them, while defence lawyers were not allowed to bring in international expertise and the evidence produced by Libyan medical experts was questioned by international medical experts."

Declan Butler, a reporter for Nature, has a blog which may be of some interest to our Most Loyal Readers who are interested in the intersection of science and public health with human rights. He has tracked this case closely and has a resource page for those who wish to take action.

And finally, while I was roaming the Amnesty site for more information on the case I stumbled on this fascinating report released last summer, Caring for human rights: Challenges and opportunities for nurses and midwives. Check it out!

Bringing Bhopal to LA Environmental Education Fair

This Saturday Group 22 members will once again be tabling at the Los Angeles Environmental Education Fair and we'll once again be calling attention to the campaign for justice for the people of Bhopal, India. Right now activists are marching from Bhopal to Delhi to publicize the health and environmental issues still stemming from the chemical accident in Bhopal more than 20 years ago. You can follow the marchers progress at this blog. There's a new focus and factsheet for each day as well as pictures and maps. More insights and pictures at this blog. Amnesty's part in this campaign and actions you can take to support the marchers are available here.

Paul Farmer Interview

Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains) was interviewed on NPR this morning about the impact of political violence on public health in Haiti.